Cheesecloth Journaling

The yogurt maker in my kitchen is new. I eat a lot of yogurt, and thought it might be fun to make it myself. So far I’ve made it flavored with orange and lemon zest from our trees, vanilla, nutmeg, and cinnamon. All without any sugar and no added artificial sweetener. The problem (for me, your results may vary) is that if I taste anything sweet, even sweetened with “safe” artificial sweeteners, I crave sugar. So, the best way for me to avoid sugar is not to eat any. It’s hard, but necessary.

I like the scented yogurts. I add crushed nuts to the nutmeg scented and blueberries to the lemon flavored. But what I love most of all is turning four of the small containers out into a cheesecloth-lined sieve and waiting. In about three hours, I have a sieve full of Greek yogurt.

So why is this called Cheesecloth journaling? Because I have noticed that not all cheesecloth is the same. There is woven and there is knit. And cheesecloth is versatile and excellent for using on journal pages.

The woven cheesecloth looks great on black paper. The stark graphic design allows for busy edges. The cheesecloth on the card is completely flat, held down with matte medium. It looks dimensional, though.

Recently, I’ve lost my heart to knit cheesecloth. It looks like cheesecloth, but it comes in a long tube, and when you dye it, you notice it has stripes. Ink makes a useful dye, so I used it to color up this piece.

Can’t show you what I did with it, not yet. But it goes with one of my inner heroes. And it really transforms a page. You can sew over it to attach it to a page, you can layer the dyed over the white, and you can add random threads over the whole thing. It’s incredibly inexpensive, and it is versatile on the page as in the kitchen.

Meanwhile, I’ve switched to straining the yogurt through a coffee filter, so I can play with more of the cheesecloth. I’ve got priorities, after all.

—-Quinn McDonald is a writer and devotee of homemade yogurt. She wrote 3,000 words today and doesn’t know any more for now.

3000 words! just today. My grand daughter would be impressed.
She and my daughter have a competition going right now. They are each writing fiction. The first one to fifty pages wins!
But quality counts too and they are regularly sending me the latest pages to keep them going. I look forward to reading my almost daily contributions. My job is to make sure the story flows and stays interesting. We each have to do our part…the inner critic is on the run here.